Post subject: Re: National Broadband Plan will cost the taxpayer over €2bn

Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2018 5:54 pm

IMF'd

Joined: Sep 13, 2007Posts: 31854Location: Tullamore

Magpie wrote:

yoganmahew wrote:

Yeah, the FTTH is the dogs bollocks, despite the Eir DNS massacre last week.It is incredibly consistent and the good upload speed means google can capture all my data without slowing me down.

You change the DNS in your router to Google or OpenDNS

Much better service, they are free - but they have a cost.

Yes, but I was away at the time, and the router is locked down to that sort of messing so explaining it over the phone wasn't really an option! Mrs. YM was delighted with the internet blackout for a day

_________________"It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good."

Post subject: Re: National Broadband Plan will cost the taxpayer over €2bn

Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2018 7:58 pm

Nationalised

Joined: May 3, 2007Posts: 12063

You may also change the router dns to cloudflare, 1.1.1.1 . Opendns cloudflare and google are in the INEX which means they are all 'in' Dublin in network terms so DNS response is very fast from all three. I think opendns is in AWS actually. Also near the INEX is Quad9 dns which is on 9.9.9.9 and which additionally supports DNS over TLS if you point at port 853 instead of the default port 53 for enhanced privacy.

Post subject: Re: National Broadband Plan will cost the taxpayer over €2bn

Posted: Fri Nov 09, 2018 10:05 am

Of Systemic Importance

Joined: Nov 4, 2011Posts: 6022Location: SthDub

Newstalk Breakfast had a feature this morning and according to eir, the rural uptake is currently running at 1 in 7. And that's in the more densely populated rural areas.

I spent a lot of time this summer in a very rural part of the West of Ireland and did a bit of work from home to keep things ticking over. I used a vodafone dongle and was well able to log on to my work network, deal with emails etc.We were also able to use the dongle for surfing on both mobile phones and tablets.

I'm not feeling good about a €2bn roll-out of fibre despite some of the assurance provided on these pages and the cons of mobile bband as set out. I think we're about to embark on an enormous white elephant

Post subject: Re: National Broadband Plan will cost the taxpayer over €2bn

Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2018 11:09 am

Neo Landlord

Joined: May 21, 2017Posts: 202

In the end, this is a housing issue. The technical issues are complex but the real problem is that no politician will admit the obvious: our rural settlement pattern, with houses scattered across the countryside and not in villages, makes it impossible to get everyone in Ireland on broadband. Most of the 500,000 premises are one-off houses and not farms.

The political commitment is impossible to fulfill (it is also uneconomic of course - the commercial operators are already rolling broadband out wherever it is economically viable). Any rational level of charges will deter many households in rural Ireland who will rely instead on mobile, wifimax, satellite or whatever. In parts of Ireland the population density is so low that the cost of laying the fibre would exceed the value of all the houses it could serve (and many of those households will not take it!).

There has been no cost/benefit analysis and there are no figures of how much end-users will be charged but it is obvious that, unlike e.g. electricity , take-up of broadband will be very price-sensitive. In some ways, this is comparable to the Irish Water story where, for decades, the politicians pretended that the service was cost-free and made a mess when they tried to rationalise it. No surprise, that take-up of broadband in rural areas is reportedly very low:https://www.independent.ie/opinion/comm ... 13131.html

Post subject: Re: National Broadband Plan will cost the taxpayer over €2bn

Posted: Tue Nov 13, 2018 10:27 am

Under CAB Investigation

Joined: Oct 19, 2010Posts: 2671Location: Dublin SE

FreeFallin wrote:

I'm not feeling good about a €2bn roll-out of fibre despite some of the assurance provided on these pages and the cons of mobile bband as set out. I think we're about to embark on an enormous white elephant

Post subject: Re: National Broadband Plan will cost the taxpayer over €2bn

Posted: Tue Nov 13, 2018 11:43 am

Under CAB Investigation

Joined: Jun 16, 2007Posts: 2978Location: Oighearland

FreeFallin wrote:

I'm not feeling good about a €2bn roll-out of fibre despite some of the assurance provided on these pages and the cons of mobile bband as set out. I think we're about to embark on an enormous white elephant

6 years ago, I recall being rudely berated by a 'popular' pinster about suggesting that mobile broadband would continue. Still yet to change my mind on that. Absolutely fiber is much faster etc.., but a lot of clever tricks used by mobile to deliver faster data rates.

_________________advice to future unemployed TDs at the next general election: dont look at it as a failure, see it as an opportunity to 'upskill'.

This is bollox. Satellite broadband is always bollox unless you are a) in the middle of an ocean or b) in a jungle wilderness.

The biggest satellite serving ireland right now has less throughput for all of Ireland than a normal street cabinet used by Eir or Virgin in a housing estate. Spacex will not change anything of note, except in really poor countries around the equator. Nor will any other space satellite broadband wheeze.

4G or 5g will work as a fibre substitute in around 20% of the country, the most rural 20% and with a very low population, that would be around 50,000 of the 500,000 households in the NBP. The other 450,000 need a fibre solution.

This is bollox. Satellite broadband is always bollox unless you are a) in the middle of an ocean or b) in a jungle wilderness.

The biggest satellite serving ireland right now has less throughput for all of Ireland than a normal street cabinet used by Eir or Virgin in a housing estate. Spacex will not change anything of note, except in really poor countries around the equator. Nor will any other space satellite broadband wheeze.

4G or 5g will work as a fibre substitute in around 20% of the country, the most rural 20% and with a very low population, that would be around 50,000 of the 500,000 households in the NBP. The other 450,000 need a fibre solution.

Crap maths alert....

The SpaceX satellites are much lower (like 1000km vs 35,000km) and have bandwidth per satellite of ~20Gbps.

My house on a crappy 50Mbps connection typically downloads about 750GB/mo.So that's an average of about 1GB/hour, or 0.002Gbps.

So one satellite can support 10,000 of my households, at best. How many Irish households are beyond fibre?

SpaceX are "planning" to launch 4,425 satellites, so that's 44 million households, or about 177 million people, or about 2% of the earth's population.

_________________"It's easy to confuse what is with what ought to be, especially when what is has worked out in your favour"Tyrion Lannister

Post subject: Re: National Broadband Plan will cost the taxpayer over €2bn

Posted: Wed Nov 14, 2018 11:56 pm

Nationalised

Joined: May 3, 2007Posts: 12063

Eschatologist wrote:

]Crap maths alert....

The SpaceX satellites are much lower (like 1000km vs 35,000km) and have bandwidth per satellite of ~20Gbps.

My house on a crappy 50Mbps connection typically downloads about 750GB/mo.So that's an average of about 1GB/hour, or 0.002Gbps.

So one satellite can support 10,000 of my households, at best. How many Irish households are beyond fibre?

SpaceX are "planning" to launch 4,425 satellites, so that's 44 million households, or about 177 million people, or about 2% of the earth's population.

OK have some better math. A constellation of 4,500 satellites as you describe there covers 'the earth' but we all know 'the earth' is 2/3 water.

At 1000km we can assume safely enough that 4000 are engaging land to some extent and only 500 are like TOTALLY over a pole or a large ocean with no people (and they have no backhaul in Antartica either but no matter). This is also assuming that we don't have in orbit spares counted in the 4500 and that we do not have EG 25 planes of 200 sats each with 5 spares per plane or whatever the redundancy ratio is in such a constellation. I am assuming that 4000 out of 4500 are beaming at any given time.

The 4000 in actual service are, of course, covering all of humanity or 8 Billion people by the time this lot launches. This means that every satellite in the constellation of 4000, in effect, is covering an average of 2,000,000 people at any given time, sometimes more and sometimes less.

The land area of the earth is around 150m sq km while the remaining 300m sq km is water. I assumed, probably wrongly and also with some evident caveats, that the 4000 will therefore be serving 150m sq km or 37500 sq km of land per satellite. The state has a surface area around twice that 37500 sq km of land that but I would assume (probably correctly) that 4 sats are actually covering the state at any one time, in whole or in part, and with most people served by 1 of the 4 at a time on an ascending or descending orbital plane.

This means that the entire population of Ireland have 20gbits x 4 ( Total 80gbits) available to them at most and that only those on edge swathes have a lot available while the 'main' satellite at any given moment is probably covering 3m people...this is simply because satellites move but houses don't.

20 gbits thruput once spread across 2 million people (the National Broadband plan is to service 1.4 million people) is fuck all in mathematical terms. 80 gbits thruput off 4 birds is fuck all in mathematical terms too.

My boreen in Galway, alone, has 2.5gbits already, a single GPON standard PON. If we need an upgrade we go to NG-PON2 or XG-PON in the next decade and the same boreen will be then be sharing 40 or possibly 100m GIGABITS.

A 4G cell with fibre backhaul (that very few of them owing to wayleave issues with commonages and farmers who own teh land around these high sites I can assure you) could handle 1gbit per sector and with 3 sectors in use in a typical cell that could be 3gbits.

Most 4g cells actually have 155-600 mbits of backhaul for all users on STM1 or STM4 wireless links. That 4g cell covers, typically, a parish or so. 4G (or 5G) would have say 600 mbits at best for 1000 households or 3,000 people. Rare ones have 3gbits or 1gbit per sector. 10 gibit feeds to rural cells are almost unheard of even if the local telephone exchange 2 miles away has 10gbit product available.

All of this 4g/5g tech cannot compete with my GPON fibre that I only share with a few neighbours, thank you for reading.

Post subject: Re: National Broadband Plan will cost the taxpayer over €2bn

Posted: Thu Nov 15, 2018 12:13 am

Of Systemic Importance

Joined: Nov 4, 2011Posts: 6022Location: SthDub

2Pack wrote:

4G or 5g will work as a fibre substitute in around 20% of the country, the most rural 20% and with a very low population, that would be around 50,000 of the 500,000 households in the NBP. The other 450,000 need a fibre solution.

At current take up rates, 20% of them will. That's 90,000 houses or a cost of €22,222 per house

Post subject: Re: National Broadband Plan will cost the taxpayer over €2bn

Posted: Thu Nov 15, 2018 12:23 am

Nationalised

Joined: May 3, 2007Posts: 12063

FreeFallin wrote:

2Pack wrote:

4G or 5g will work as a fibre substitute in around 20% of the country, the most rural 20% and with a very low population, that would be around 50,000 of the 500,000 households in the NBP. The other 450,000 need a fibre solution.

At current take up rates, 20% of them will. That's 90,000 houses or a cost of €22,222 per house

4G is not that expensive.

Eir costs for passing rural homes today is around €7-800 per premises. Of the remaining 500,000 rural homes the most rural 50,000 will cost €3000 per premises and if you apply the bullshit figures in the Irish times last week on a takeup of 1 in 7, that could translate into an effective €21,000 per premises based on erroneous takeup and based on the most extremely rural of the rural who are NOT included in the eir rural rollout today. They are sticking to highly populated rural areas, mainly. Doing bullshit math again a takeup of 1 in 7 against a real life cost of 7 x €800 would be €5600 per premises served.

In actual fact most of the premises in the NBP will be passed for around €1000 each. Only the most extreme conflation of the hardest cases and bullshit reporting in the Irish Times could possibly find a number over €20,000

The actual takeup is 22% not 14%. Furthermore Vodafone and Sky have half the rural broadband fixed customer base and they do not provide fibre services.

That really translates into 22% out of the 50% who are not locked into Vodafone and Sky contracts and an effective penetration rate of over 40% given the distortion in the market. Vodafone and Sky are expected to enter the rural FTTH market over the winter.

This is bollox. Satellite broadband is always bollox unless you are a) in the middle of an ocean or b) in a jungle wilderness.

The biggest satellite serving ireland right now has less throughput for all of Ireland than a normal street cabinet used by Eir or Virgin in a housing estate. Spacex will not change anything of note, except in really poor countries around the equator. Nor will any other space satellite broadband wheeze.

4G or 5g will work as a fibre substitute in around 20% of the country, the most rural 20% and with a very low population, that would be around 50,000 of the 500,000 households in the NBP. The other 450,000 need a fibre solution.

SpaceX just received permission to add another 7,000 statelites to their internet constellation bringing the total in the constellation to about 12,000.

Even if they launch 50 at a time, with a lifetime of 4 yrs they will need 60 launches per year (almost triple the current launch rate) to maintain the network.

They are not going to do that to serve a few ships and villages in Africa. This is a deliberate attempt to serve a large market with high speed broadband. They will out compete other providers in all but the most densely populated areas.

_________________"Perfect is the enemy of the good" Voltaire (1694 - 1778)